The Final Diagnosis by Cynric Temple-Camp

Author:Cynric Temple-Camp [Temple-Camp, Cynric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Covid comes

‘Is anybody talking about anything else? Everywhere I go, people are talking about nothing but this bloody coronavirus!’

It was the first week in March 2020, and a group of pathologists from Australia, the United States, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and New Zealand were on the phone together, trying to find out what on Earth was going on around the world. We were not getting any reliable information from the floundering officials other than a mix of panicky messages usually followed by blandly reassuring ones.

These were still the early days of the virus. ‘Corona’ was the name still commonly bruited about, although Covid-19 had appeared by some bureaucratic diktat in February. We had not yet discovered the delights of Zoom, so there we were, all on an obsolescent teleconference.

The whole world was about to experience a seismic social shift.

I was bemused, and maybe even slightly amused, by it all. I thought this was going to be another case of mass global hysteria and not much would happen. After all, I had seen SARS, MERS, Ebola, swine flu and bird flu all come into the limelight, only to not come to much, then disappear from the news without a trace. Nothing much seemed to happen in New Zealand infection-wise, and that was especially true here in Palmerston North.

‘Nah, it won’t amount to anything,’ I told my colleagues and other people who were starting to anxiously look sideways at the unfolding events.

First there had been the problem in Wuhan. OK, but that was somewhere in China. Never even heard of it before, so not our problem, right? But then came Italy — that was different. We all knew people who had gone there and even some who were just about to go there on holiday. Lockdown? What was the hell was a lockdown? In Italy? How could that be?!

The World Health Organization was saying there wasn’t a pandemic, and ‘there was no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade and travel’. They didn’t recommend ‘limiting trade and movement’. They had also said ‘Well done!’ to the Chinese government for their impressive transparency and honesty in effectively containing the new virus.

So, everything was all OK . . . or was it?

‘We know how these viruses spread and so can knock them out at source,’ I confidently told everyone. ‘And it will only take a few months for the big pharmaceuticals to bang out a vaccine. Then it will all be over.’

Was I in for a shock! We were all in for a shock.

My colleague Evangelos from Berlin started my shockwave of doubt, announcing to the teleconference: ‘Germany is in partial lockdown. All the schools are closed. Even the football is grounded, and that shows it’s serious. You can’t find a café or bar open. We think the shops are closing next and probably they’re going to close the borders, even with other parts of Europe . . . it’s just unbelievable. About a hundred of our staff are French and commute across the border to three of our labs.

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